How to Tune your car?

To truly get the most out of your vehicle, you need to tweak your nitrous oxide tank, your gear ratios, and your tire pressure. And we'll explain how, in this guide.

To actually unlock this stuff, you first need to upgrade the relevant bits of your car. You'll need stage two nitrous, stage four transmission, and stage three tires to unlock these three tuning options.

Then, you're able to tweak the digits of each part.

Nitrous Oxide

By dragging the meter to the left, you will increase the length of time that the boost lasts, but decrease the actual power of the nitro. This may be good for the half mile races.

On the other hand, dragging to the right will give you a short, but powerful burst of speed. This is good for quickly building up speed, and can even compensate for a car with low acceleration.

Final Drive

This balances your gear ratio - a high final drive provides fast acceleration, while a low ratio will give you a greater maximum speed.

Tire Pressure

Tweak this to balance grip and acceleration. Trading grip for acceleration is good, but remember that the less grip you have, the more wheelspin you'll experience.

When tweaking your car, you'll quickly see how your stats are affected by looking at the positive or negative number at the top of the screen, under your car name. A positive number means that the tuning setup will generally improve your car, while a negative number means the opposite.

But that's just in general. You'll want to run a dyno to see how the changes will affect each and every aspect of your race. The important thing to look at is whether your car is optimised for quarter or half mile races.

You'll almost always be able to see how long a race is before you enter it. Most are quarter mile races, and those reward cars that can rocket off the starting line and have fast acceleration. For those that are a half mile, you'll have more time to reach a higher maximum speed and beat your opponent that way.

When tuning, you'll almost certainly want to stray away from the extreme ends of the spectrum. Super high pressure tires or ultra high final drive just aren't good options: instead, push the needle a little to the left, or a tad to the right.

You can use tuning to counteract a car's general abilities. If your car has poor grip, then you can tune the air pressure in the tires to fix that. You'll also want to revisit the tuning shop every time you upgrade a part, to make sure that new part hasn't tipped the balance.

If you're still struggling to keep up, look at your performance. See how much your wheels are spinning during a race (the little orange wheel icon on your gear shifter) and tweak your pressure to fit.

And also look at the speed chart at the end of a failed race. Where did your opponent beat you? Above, my 0-60 is great but that didn't help me win - I obviously need to tune my car a little differently.